This week we noticed a new feature in our Google Analytics account – a set of reports called “Search Engine Optimization.” Google announced that these reports are out of beta and now available to all users.

Is Google really going to help us with our SEO?

The reports are found in the new interface, under the “Traffic Sources” section. Setup requires a Google Webmaster account. After you connect your accounts, the data sharing is almost instant, although metrics from the past two days aren’t available.

1. Query Reports

The query report lists the top 1000 queries along with number of impressions, clicks, average position and click-through rate (CTR). Users familiar with Webmaster Tools will recognize the layout, although it feels cleaner in Google Analytics.

One thing that looks out of place is “average position.” Most people think of average position in Google’s search results to mean “rank”, but this is not the same thing. For example, our Queries report shows SEOmoz’s average position for the word “seomoz” is 3.5. Huh?

You don’t need to be the SEO of SEOmoz to know that we rank #1 for our brand term. Even if we saw advertisements above our name (we don’t) or odd vertical results, any reasonable person could tell you we rank #1.

But Google doesn't display rank. Instead, they record the position of each impression. With a 6 Pack of results, SEOmoz appears 7 times for each query. This means the average position is 4 for this particular result.

From Google’s Webmaster Help.

“To calculate average position, we take into account the ranking of your site for a particular query (for example, if a query returns your site as the #1 and #2 result, then the average position would be 1.5).”

Is this useful? I’d rather Google display the highest position when showing us this data, which would present a more actionable metric to webmasters.

PRO Tip – Finding Opportunities in the Queries Report

To discover optimizing opportunities, you can use advanced filters to find keyword queries that:

Send you a good amount of traffic

You rank for, but...

...you don’t rank #1 (or 2 or 3)

These are "golden" keywords. Since these queries already send you visits, a small gain in rankings could lead to big gains in traffic. Not all keywords should be optimized – it’s important to know your conversion data here. For example, the report tells us that SEOmoz receives a lot of accidental traffic for the phrase “cute pictures'. This is not a keyword we need to optimize for.

The only problem is the query report does not tell you what page these queries are landing on, so you have to perform extra work to find this information out. That, and the “average position” metric isn’t as useful as rank.

Not to tout our own products, but you can also find these keywords with the SEOmoz PRO platform, which displays your actual keyword ranking and the URLs that rank for the keyword phrase. It's easy and saves me a ton of time.

2. Landing Pages Report

The Landing Pages report shows how many times your top landing pages were shown in search results, again along with average position and CTR.

Average position isn’t as useful in this report, as you don’t know the exact search query, but it does paint a picture of your search visibility.

PRO Tip – Optimize for CTR

Again you can use advanced filters to find landing pages with:

High number of impressions

High average position

Low click-through rates.

Look at these URLs for title tags and meta descriptions. Is there anywhere you could improve how the results display in the SERPS? Often, there is a very good reason for low CTR outside your control, especially when search engines show search results that don’t match user intent.

My biggest wish for this report would be for it to display landing pages and queries together. You can find these in other parts of GA, but right here would be ideal.

3. Geographical Summary

The Geographical report shows you impressions and click-through by country – great for international SEO where you target other countries. For example, we can see that although SEOmoz gets more impressions in India, we actually get more clicks from the UK.

More interesting is the Google Properties Report, inexplicably hidden in the Geographical Summary. There’s not a ton of actionable data, but you can see how your site performs among different search results, including Image, Mobile and Video.

Does the Search Engine Optimization Report Help Your SEO?

Google's SEO reports are still rough around the edges. Every metric requires extra work on your part to make it actionable. How much will Google share? Nowhere near what Blekko gives SEOs. That said, the reports are a welcome addition and a win for transparency, which Google desperately needs.

If you use the data correctly, the reports reveal insight into not only into how your website performs, but also the strange ways Google’s search results operate in the real world. Strange indeed.

Comments
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compliments for the very easy to understand explication you gave and for the tips.

I would like to underline just one fact. If Google is merging GWT and Google Analytics under a SEO label that means:

it seems that Google wants to show a less "acid" face to SEOs, as we have always this sort of love/hate relation with G.

it is obvious that SEO and Analytics, are merging (maybe not still as professional figures), so that if someone had still to start learning how to really use Google Analytics (and at least another Analytic tool), it is better he starts right now his way to becom Analytics Ninja.

Thanks for this, I'm still finding my way around the new Analytics! I agree with the comment above, Google needs to give us a way to combine the search query report with the land page report so we can see CTR for each search term and land page combination. Apart from that, I think it's great this information is being displayed in one place and hope Google will do the same with other webmaster reports.

Call me a cynic, but this seems like a ploy to get SEOs to link the accounts so Google can gain even more data to use against us. If there's one thing I've learned from Google, it's that you can't trust them- no matter how awesome their products may be.

Wow! We love this. We hadn't linked any accounts until after reading this post (gave us a good reason to start playing around!).

Found great data using the "Query Opportunity Report" for NEW clients. In most instances, we're already aware of these keywords (and their positioning) for clients we've been working with, but when we linked a newer clients account we found 3 keywords that we previously thought might be solid. Now we know they're performers and have the data to back it up.

Thank you cyrus for your advices specially the one about average position (lot of my clients wondered why google give them a 3 or 4 average position on their brand name but with this it's definetely clear)

I have a suggestion in what you have called "golden keywords". I think that it's important for ecommerce websites to have a clear view on the monetary value of that range of keywords.

So it could be useful to add ecommerce data into the Google analytics segment. What do you think? and what is the best way to create that segment?

I do agree with the fact that it’s a good addition but I don’t think this is going to help much when drafting strategies for future…

I mean one of the important factor that requires while making or adjusting the existing strategies is based upon current rankings, and as you said what Google shows in their data is not the current rankings the average position.

I have tried SEOmoz and I think this is an ideal tool for checking websites health and producing very actionable reports for visibility improvement.

Nice overview Cyrus - we're just in the middle of launching a new site for ourselves and running several content reviews for clients which were far more time consuming under the previous style of GA.

One question on the average position though - I understand why your average position for seomoz was 4, but we've got averages of 6.9 and 3.8 since July 10, 2011 (the earliest we can get these results on our site for some reason) for two keywords that we have ranked first for months if not years. Doing a search for either doesn't bring up extra site links, a 6 or 7-pack, other listings further down or any vertical search results ahead of us (there are image results, but these come beneath us).

How do you suppose these odd average positions came about? Do the positions take into account rankings in other search engines, or could it just be that at some point between now and July there were other vertical results in the way?

It's a mystery, to be sure. I've heard from other SEOs that performing a video only, image only or news only search might reveal extra impressions. Other times your extra impressions may be hidden on pages 3-5. Also, personalization and localization of results means you may never know what impressions others are seeing for the same query.

Honestly, I've had so many discussions about this in the last week, and the overall consensus is that it's a confusing metric. If anyone can think of a helpful reason for Google to show "Average position" instead of "Average Highest position," please let us know.

Ha ha, well as long as it's not just me that's stumped on that! It does seem odd to opt for a metric that's A) confusing and B) not entirely helpful, but hey.

Just annoying as it would be far easier to work out which tag / descriptions were working best by comparing the CTR with the averages for that Google position, but I suppose the length of time this takes is no more or less than under the old GA.

Very nice article, thanks! One thing that worries me about the data I'm seeing is that it seems to be exhibiting a lot of "Google Math". The number of impressions seem to be always rounded off (or maybe truncated?) to even thousands (100's if <1k) and that's pretty common with them but looking at month of July and into early August, it seems to be capped in impressions for some reason. Our traffic is higher on the weekdays and light on weekends. Looking weeks during that time, Mondays through Thursdays we ALWAYS had exactly 2,500 impressions each day, no more no less. Fridays - Sundays the number drops of and there's more variation but the graph looks like a colection of mesas. Even with rounding, that seems suspiciously even.

Is it actually showing the number of impressions or is it just giving a representative sample based on overall traffic? Does a busier site have a similar cap but at a higher number? I wonder how real the number of impressions actually are or is it just a sample?

Love the post, I just went and followed the steps, great info. Would you work harder on the pages that are already getting a lot of traction or try building up pages that aren't getting more and get them to the point of the other pages?

Thanks for a good post. Allthough I must say, amongst others, that the keyword positions of some of my highranked keywords does not remotely resembles my own measurements, off course taking in into account that the way Google measures the positions. For instance I have position 90 the last month on a keyword that has rank 9 in Google, thats just one example and does not make sense - could you perhaps explaine this?

However, I really like the merging of those two tools, lets hope Google will work on developing further on it :-)

Cyrus,
How accurate is this data? There are two different reports in GA which sound similar but give totally different data sets to me.
1. I am using the Organic Keyword report which is in Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic (this shows that I am receiving 3118 visits in a week due to Organic traffic across search engines)
2. The other report that I am viewing is Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimisation > Queries (this shows that I am receiving 1300 clicks on the website)
I am aware that the 2nd report shows this data for the top 1000 queries but even if I apply this constraint to the 1st report, I end up with a total of 2670 visits. Now the only other explanation I have is that this might be due to the user staying for a longer period of time on the site, and thus increasing in the no. of visits (which should reflect in my average time on site).
Am I missing something here? Which report do I trust more?

I agree, these reports are defintely a welcome addition. I believe most of this information was already previously available through Google Webmasters, but, adding it right in with Analytics makes sense.

They def should update the "Avg" ranking factor to the actual ranking of your site for the keyword in mind, it's easier to understand by 5000% and more actionable.

Thanks for posting all the helpful information. The query report lists the top 1000 queries along with number of impressions, clicks, average position and click-through rate. The Landing Pages report shows how many times your top landing pages were shown in search results, again along with average position and CTR.

Great post! Do you think impressions could become a better KPI than rank? As the SERP becomes more personalized and variable, rank tracking becomes less useful, and I need a more reliable way to know how often I am seen in the SERP.

I noticed these reports a couple days ago and started playing around. I share your opinion in that I don't really think the reports are too valuable yet, but they're being moved in there for a reason and it's the "what are they planning for" that's going to be exciting.

As an SEO, I hope that Google doesn't expand Analytics too much, it's a statistics reporting tool and sure, what's been written here does fall under statistics, but it's not an SEO Tool, per say. I like things in separate areas, so I'm hoping they don't try to build an entire SEO Tool inside Analytics.

It's going to be interesting to watch where Google move from here and how this starts competiting with SEO Tools around the web.

"As an SEO, I hope that Google doesn't expand Analytics too much, it's a statistics reporting tool and sure, what's been written here does fall under statistics, but it's not an SEO Tool, per say. I like things in separate areas, so I'm hoping they don't try to build an entire SEO Tool inside Analytics."

On contrary, I think that Google actually expand Analytics. Also, Since Google+ started , I think that Google focused more to grab advantage in social network bookmarking rather than to strenghten position in search engine which implies it's No.1 so far.

So, I would say that there are some big changing 'post-panda effect' problems, which even Google don't know how to solve it.

Time on Site is one of the best metrics to let you know if people are enjoying and finding your site useful. I would love to see time spent on site, bounce rate and page views under the Landing Pages Report.

Great post Cyrus; the average position measured is not very usefull I agree. It would be better to use the weighted mean, because I have a keyword which is on position 1 and on position 32. I am pretty sure that the keyword is hardly getting any views on position 32.

It's not about each ones portfolio but, at least personally, I think it's an important move and regardless of each agency's portfolio we should keep track of everything and provide the best advice if needed regardless of the client size and budget.

Great question. Like gfiorelli says, $150,000 is a lot of money for most website owners, including us. We're focusing instead on making great SEO tools. Basic GA allows up to 10,000,000 hits per month - defined here. Although SEOmoz isn't there yet, we're getting close.

I was also thinking that you can get to review it without paying ? (as seomoz that is not like a free trial for everybody)

Personally I think there are a lot of companies that will consider going premium even if that means 12,500 per mo as they probably already use other similar services that can even go above this amount.

For a lot of websites GA freshness is crucial and a 4 h window is close to good without mentioning support and all the other features.

I am not trying to play 'Im so cool' card but i think it's an important move from google and if a client asks we can't just answer .. well, it's 150k so don't bother about it :)

I've promise my self I won't start a debate and hopefully this won't be considered one but anyway feel free to thumb me down if u think the opposite :)

Agree but there are a lot of websites that still needs something diffrent then the usual GA flow. There are a tons of limitation with standard GA even if you are an expert in using it. (you can even write a book about those limitation without getting to specific)

Fantastic post Cyrus. I noticed this the other day and was happy because Webmaster Tools often seems to get neglected and yet it has so much potential. Agreed about the annoyance that Google doesn't show which page is ranked well for keyword X ('cute pictures') - there's the same issue in Analytics with referrals from domains rather than pages. At least we've got SEOmoz!

"But Google doesn't display rank. Instead, they record the position of each impression. With a 6 Pack of results, SEOmoz appears 7 times for each query. This means the average position is 4 for this particular result"

SEOMoz appears as result 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 all at once. They appear multiple times for the same query, all at the same time on the same page. The average of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 is 4 because (1+2+3+4+5+6+7)/7 = 4. Hope that helps.

It feels like a hangover from Adwords where in that interface, the CTR is totally vital as it determines a large portion of what you have to pay to acheive a certain position (Nb - in PPC, not organic listings). In that interface, they give you the average position because it changes constantly with what everyone else is bidding, and so they've got average positions on their mind.

I am effortless in the approach when measuring the SEO performance. Google analytics is best platform for utilize your efforts and this new add up is totally great for use in many ways. For more functionality we have to add up some more metrics to get the best measurement reports as Cyrus said. This will be certainly help in SEO perspective. One thing I like the most is Google Properties Report, through this we can see how our site performs with the different search results including video, image etc.

I am grateful for the practical steps you offer relating to pulling reports, analyzing them, and reflecting on insights. I am little bit confuse about calculate average position in query reports. That would be great Cyrus if you drop your feedback on this.

Cyrus, I really like your explanation of Average Position. BUT I don't think this will help out my SEO in anyway. It's nice to have, but SEOmoz still provides much better accuracy. I am a SEOmoz subscriber and GWT/GA is free, but I don't mind paying the extra money to have competitve analysis. GA doesn't provide that so in my book knowing that SEOMOZ is a couple steps ahead of GA is worth paying the SEOMoz monthly subscription.

Agreed, Average Position is mostly useless. In the future, I'd love to see a standardized "Search Visibility Score" that ranks you against your competitors for your primary + related keyword and takes into consideration rank and impressions.

It was wonderful that you spotted this new report and useful that you identified how to use it toward improving content. As data accumulates, I hope to improve communication with patients seeking dental care. Thanks.

These new reports are pretty cool but after testing them on 5 websites, and comparing the data with my own tools I am not 100% sure about some of the results which are showing but oh well the more SEO data provided the better =)